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A form-function mismatch?
(2019)
On uninterpretable features
(2019)
Preface
(2019)
Interlocutors typically link their utterances to the discourse environment and enrich communication by linguistic (e.g., information packaging) and extra-linguistic (e.g., eye gaze, gestures) means to optimize information transfer. Psycholinguistic studies underline that ‒for meaning computation‒ listeners profit from linguistic and visual cues that draw their focus of attention to salient information. This dissertation is the first work that examines how linguistic compared to visual salience cues influence sentence comprehension using the very same experimental paradigms and materials, that is, German subject-before-object (SO) and object-before-subject (OS) sentences, across the two cue modalities. Linguistic salience was induced by indicating a referent as the aboutness topic. Visual salience was induced by implicit (i.e., unconscious) or explicit (i.e., shared) manipulations of listeners’ attention to a depicted referent.
In Study 1, a selective, facilitative impact of linguistic salience on the context-sensitive OS word order was found using offline comprehensibility judgments. More precisely, during online sentence processing, this impact was characterized by a reduced sentence-initial Late positivity which reflects reduced processing costs for updating the current mental representation of discourse. This facilitative impact of linguistic salience was not replicated by means of an implicit visual cue (Study 2) shown to modulate word order preferences during sentence production. However, a gaze shift to a depicted referent as an indicator of shared attention eased sentence-initial processing similar to linguistic salience as revealed by reduced reading times (Study 3). Yet, this cue did not modulate the strong subject-antecedent preference during later pronoun resolution like linguistic salience. Taken together, these findings suggest a significant impact of linguistic and visual salience cues on sentence comprehension, which substantiates that both the information delivered via language and via the visual environment is integrated into the mental representation of the discourse; but, the way how salience is induced is crucial to its impact.
Word forms such as walked or walker are decomposed into their morphological constituents (walk + -ed/-er) during language comprehension. Yet, the efficiency of morphological decomposition seems to vary for different languages and morphological types, as well as for first and second language speakers. The current study reports results from a visual masked priming experiment focusing on different types of derived word forms (specifically prefixed vs. suffixed) in first and second language speakers of German. We compared the present findings with results from previous studies on inflection and compounding and proposed an account of morphological decomposition that captures both the variability and the consistency of morphological decomposition for different morphological types and for first and second language speakers. Open Practices This article has been awarded an Open Materials badge. Study materials are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at . Learn more about the Open Practices badges from the Center for Open Science.
Matching participants (as suggested by Hope, 2015) may be one promising option for research on a potential bilingual advantage in executive functions (EF). In this study we first compared performances in three EF-tasks of a naturally heterogeneous sample of monolingual (n = 69, age = 9.0 y) and multilingual children (n = 57, age = 9.3 y). Secondly, we meticulously matched participants pairwise to obtain two highly homogeneous groups to rerun our analysis and investigate a potential bilingual advantage. The initally disadvantaged multilinguals (regarding socioeconomic status and German lexicon size) performed worse in updating and response inhibition, but similarly in interference inhibition. This indicates that superior EF compensate for the detrimental effects of the background variables. After matching children pairwise on age, gender, intelligence, socioeconomic status and German lexicon size, performances became similar except for interference inhibition. Here, an advantage for multilinguals in the form of globally reduced reaction times emerged, indicating a bilingual executive processing advantage.